2015 BUDGET PREVIEW: The White House doesn’t plan to release its fiscal 2015 budget until March 4, but already we know quite a bit about DoD’s plans. The tricky thing is knowing which leaked decisions are trial balloons that could be revised upon public and congressional reception and which are legitimate done deals.

Today, Morning Defense is teeing up some of the major decisions that defense sources say are pretty sure bets.

THE BIG PICTURE: The budget deal forged by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) provides $9 billion in sequestration relief to the Pentagon for 2015. For 2016 through 2019, sequestration remains the law, but that won’t be reflected in DoD’s budget submission, according to one defense source. Instead, the Pentagon’s top line numbers for those years will come in above today’s congressional budget caps.

Bloomberg’s Tony Capaccio has more details, reporting last week on the “pass-back” guidance from the White House Office of Management and Budget. http://bloom.bg/1fhnKpe

DoD’s base budget for 2015 is $498 billion, that’s “$44 billion less than the $542 billion the Pentagon last year said it would request for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1,” Capaccio writes.

Sources don’t have high expectations for meaningful reforms to military pay and benefits, but they are expecting another request for domestic base closures.

ARMY-GUARD BATTLE COULD MAKE THE AIR FORCE FIGHT LOOK LIKE A WALK IN THE PARK: An ugly fight is brewing between the active-duty Army and the Guard and Reserve.

The backstory: the Army is being told to reduce its active-duty end strength to 420,000 soldiers by 2023. The Army’s not happy about it, but it’s reluctantly accepting its fate. With these numbers, the Army has crafted a proposal that would reduce the National Guard from 350,000 to 315,000.

The Army’s argument in a nutshell: If the active-duty force is being cut by roughly 100,000 soldiers, then it’s only reasonable for the Guard to share some force structure reductions.

-- THE GUARD FIGHTS BACK: Guard leaders are not buying that these decisions are being driven purely by cost-savings. Instead, they think the Army is sneakily changing how they use the reserve forces, shifting them back to a force in waiting versus one that is fully integrated into the routine deployment cycle, one defense source said. Guard leaders have "already been through a period when the Guard and Reserve were second-class citizens and no one wants to go back to that.”

-- I’LL GIVE YOU SOME BLACK HAWKS FOR ALL OF YOUR APACHES: The Army is also planning a controversial transfer of helicopters from the Guard to the active-duty. Without the money to replace its fleet of OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopters, which have been in the service since Vietnam, the Army is proposing to take all of the Guard’s 192 AH-64 Apache helicopters and assign them to active units to perform the Kiowa’s scout mission. In return, the Guard would get 111 UH-60 Black Hawks.

The Army is also planning to transfer 105 — or about half — of the Guard’s Lakota helicopters to the active-duty for training purposes. Meanwhile, the Army would retire its entire fleet of Kiowas. The Guard would also lose its fleet of 30 Kiowa Warriors.

Combined with the end strength cuts, these changes are pushing this internal fight out into the open and it’s getting very political and very ugly, very quickly.

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-- SMITH WEIGHS IN ON PROTECT-THE-GUARD LEGISLATION: Again, these proposals aren’t public yet, but already Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) has introduced legislation that would freeze all of the helicopter transfers, keep Guard end strength at 350,000 and form a commission to make recommendations about Army force structure, similar to the exercise the Air Force just went through.

No surprise, the National Guard Association of the United States is lobbying lawmakers to get on board. http://goo.gl/1LLJya

But Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, is urging his colleagues not to race to judgment. Morning D obtained a letter sent to military legislative assistants last week that says, “Congressman Smith does not support this proposed legislation because it undermines the Army’s ability to deal with budget cuts and will lead to a ‘hollow Army.’”

He says cosponsoring Wilson’s bill is “premature,” adding, “It is important to see the overall budget and where tradeoffs were made and priorities set.”

-- WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? “I think the food fight will be much more intense than the Air Force food fight,” the defense source said. “Whether Congress will get as exercised? They’ll certainly be given the opportunity.”

And don’t forget the governors. “I haven’t seen very many active-duty military leaders who can match the power of the governors,” the source told Morning D.

FEW WILL ATTEND THE GCV FUNERAL: In addition to giving up on a new helicopter, the Army has also broadcast its decision to terminate its Ground Combat Vehicle, its effort to replace the Bradley Infantry Fighting vehicle.

The decision won’t upset too many people in industry or on Capitol Hill. The teams competing for the production contract never had much faith the program would survive today’s budget battles. Meanwhile, the Army is planning upgrades for all of its existing vehicles — the Bradley, the Abrams tank and the Stryker vehicle — giving work (and money) to BAE Systems and General Dynamics, both competing for GCV.

-- 10 AIRCRAFT CARRIERS? Defense News’ Christopher P. Cavas was first to report that the Pentagon and OMB are mulling the elimination of a Navy aircraft carrier, along with one carrier air wing. http://goo.gl/uiPiDg

While the Pentagon and outside groups have considered the cut before, it has never gotten this far along in the budget process, a Hill source told Morning D.

You can expect vigorous pushback on Capitol Hill if the cut is included in the 2015 budget, and that could be exactly what the Navy wants.

As Cavas writes, cutting a carrier could be “something of a ploy, an effort by the Navy to show it’s doing its part by cutting something not only significantly expensive, but near and dear to a large segment of the service.”

OSD TOLD THE NAVY: YOU CAN’T TAKE A ‘BREAK’ FROM THE F-35C: According to a congressional source, in its 2015 budget proposal, the Navy asked to take a three-year “break” from its production of the F-35C, its variant of the Joint Strike Fighter. Concerned this was a first step toward walking away from the program permanently, OSD told the Navy: no way.

It’s an open secret that the Navy would prefer to invest more in its F-18 fighters rather than buy the F-35C. But if the Navy pulled out of the program, the unit cost — already under scrutiny — would go up for the Air Force and the Marine Corps.

2015 BUDGET SPEED READ

-- The Pentagon plans to submit a $26 billion wishlist with its budget submission, outlining how it would spend extra money if given the chance, Bloomberg’s Capaccio reports. http://bloom.bg/1kzycvQ

-- The Navy and the Office of the Secretary of Defense are determining the number of Littoral Combat Ships to include in the budget, Defense News’ Cavas reports. http://goo.gl/Olm1cN

-- The Air Force has decided not to fund an upgrade program to replace the avionics and radars on F-16s, Defense News’ Aaron Mehta and Wendell Minnick report. http://goo.gl/Y4NCg8

FIRST LOOK — PANETTA AND GATES ASK CONGRESS TO RECOGNIZE OSS: In a Jan. 30 letter, obtained by Morning D, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta are asking lawmakers to co-sponsor a bill that would award a Congressional Gold Medal to the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II predecessor to the CIA and U.S. Special Operations Command.

“We hope that by awarding a Congressional Gold Medal to the OSS, as it has to other World War II units, Congress will remind Americans that our intelligence and special operations communities were created by the ‘greatest generation,’” the two former defense secretaries wrote.

-- Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel called Air Force nuclear officers in their underground launch bunkers on Saturday to update them on efforts to address the problems plaguing the force. AP: http://apne.ws/1aeUX6X

-- The U.S. and Libya have worked together to rid the country of its chemical weapons arsenal. The New York Times: http://nyti.ms/1fEwrvj

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Authors:

About The Author

Kate Brannen is a defense reporter for POLITICO Pro.

Before coming to POLITICO, Brannen covered congress for Defense News, providing regular coverage of the budget debate on Capitol Hill and its implications for national security. Previously, she spent three years covering the U.S. Army — first as a reporter for InsideDefense.com, then as the land warfare correspondent for Defense News.

Brannen graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, with a bachelor's degree in history. She has received graduate degrees from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and School of International and Public Affairs.